Andy,
In my mind, the forum is a separate issue since they are probably on different servers and such. It just bothers me that Oracle is either NOT hearing the message that there is a PROBLEM here on the Hosted Instance of APEX and also the forums, or just doesn't care to resolve the issue.

Heck, it would be nice if they at least changed the message in regards to the forum's being down and who to contact.. The message right now is geared only for Internal Oracle employee's.. They Might want to realize that there are a FEW folks access the the support forums from OUTSIDE the Oracle domain.. Just a thought they might want to research further...

If they have been reading/hearing that there are slowdown/downtime issues constantly happening on their hosted instance of APEX, I would think (there I go again..) that they would be interested in fixing the problem.. Silly me, the whole developer and fixing software problems part of me...

Of course, the forum issues are separate - I just mention it as, presumably, it's on one of Oracle's servers.

I've tried various setups on my home computer (uses broadband, and using IE7/FF3, disabling add-ins etc) and at work (with/without proxy servers, IE6/7/8 and FF3) and still have the same issues - so I know it's nothing my end. Other than continually updating this thread, I'm not sure what else I can do - apart from "go elsewhere", of course

Joel has arranged that planned outages are notified to us on the login page, so that's a good start. It's all the unplanned outages and, particularly, speed issues that really need to be looked at. Presumably, Oracle's own staff can access the site from their home computers and see for themselves what we are seeing? One thing that does annoy me is that the only buttons that seem to work without fail are Cancel and Logout - hints, perhaps?

Friggin EU is worried that Oracle will kill an open source based product to make sure it doesn't compete with their for-profit product? Is there something I am missing there? Since mysql is open source and there a number of different branch versions of of it, and ohh year, It's Open Source, Oracle and or Sun Don't fully own it, what is the problem?

Re: Oracle employees don't have an issue accessing it from home.. Maybe they are vpn'ing into the Oracle network, thus they are not accessing it the way others are?

Re: Cancel & Logout buttons.. Yes, rather an obnoxious sign if you ask me.. Just come and get out..

I agree, this is quite ridiculous. The current service from apex.oracle.com should embarress Oracle.

Repeatedly answering posts about its performance with 'Its okay for me' is not good enough.

The hosted instance should be the flagship for APEX, the area where people can use and feel the power of the product before deciding to take it on within their business... At times it is completely unusable, at others, merely tedious to use.

Whatever is involved in sorting this out, I'm certain that it doesn't fall outside the scope of Oracle's resources.

Please can someone (Joel?) read this and do something - and if not, at least, reply?

Sorry for the lack of a reply here. With the long holiday in the U.S. and then my past two days of this week, spending at least a half a day each on apex.oracle.com, I haven't been paying attention to the discussion forums. I was unaware of this active thread.

Don't worry Ben, I'm not going to say "It's fine for me". TKyte had identified a bug or two in Ask Tom over the weekend, and I tried to fix them on Monday morning. What should have taken me 10 minutes took me two hours.

This has been my top priority for the past two days. There are some networking issues still being researched. A configuration change was made earlier today which seems to have alleviated the issue, but I'm not convinced that it will be a permanent fix.

Understand that this has not been a database issue nor an Application Express issue. Every time the performance was glacial, both yesterday and today, I examined the database and there was hardly anything going on. It was a hardware (filer) issue a month ago, and it appears to be either firewall or network card or network issue or all three. Regardless, I am embarrassed for Oracle's sake - this should be our flagship for Oracle Application Express, and the past month or two of poor performance can only serve to dissuade from using Oracle and Oracle Application Express.